


Fireworks

by Jabberwocky (Sisterwives)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Dirty Junkers in love, Fireworks, M/M, Roadrat Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 00:09:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9046661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sisterwives/pseuds/Jabberwocky
Summary: Junkrat learns that his perception of the meaning of Christmas doesn't quite line up with the rest of the world's. With nothing prepared in return when Roadhog gives him a Christmas gift, he decides to reciprocate in the only way he knows how. Intended to be canon Christmas fluff but mostly it just devolves into yelling about what Christmas entails and Junkrat rubbing his dirty little hands all over Roadhog's face.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the Roadrat Secret Santa exchange over on Tumblr! This is my gift for sillyscrunchy.

Time was fuzzy in the Outback. Junkrat’s unfailing internal clock gave him a pretty good sense of what time it was, and he could tell the general seasons based on the temperatures at night, but he couldn’t tell you the date if he was put on the spot. Days blurred into weeks into months. 

So Junkrat was surprised when he caught a glimpse of a calendar and saw that it was December 24th. He rested his grenade launcher on his shoulder and picked up the calendar. It was one of those “page a day” blocks, with each page marking the date with a bland comic strip about some office worker or another.

He scratched his head with the barrel of his grenade launcher. “Hang on just a tick.” He flipped the calendar around. “Is this thing accurate?” 

“Upside down,” Roadhog grunted.

Junkrat rotated the calendar. He waggled it, eyebrows raised.

The bank teller lowered her hands, which immediately shot up again when Roadhog fixated his scrap gun on her. “Y-yes,” she squeaked. “It’s accurate!”

Junkrat grinned and tossed the calendar over his shoulder. It skittered across the marble floor of the bank. “Roadhog, mate! Ya know what that means? It’s almost Christmas!”

“Ho ho ho,” Roadhog said, voice dry. “We’re in the middle of something right now.”

“Oh yeah, yeah, roight, sorry--” He raised his frag launcher. “Money, bag, now, make it snappy, we don’t got all day!” 

The poor bank teller emptied her drawer, surrendering all of her fifty and one hundred notes. Roadhog dumped it all in the pink, piggy-faced duffel bag that they kept for such occasions. Junkrat cleared a path to the door by bouncing several grenades in the general direction, and they hightailed it out of there. 

It wasn't a terribly good haul, as they discovered when they were finally able to settle down for the night and count their earnings: only about $2500. Junkrat had once heard that only idiots robbed banks nowadays; the cost-benefit analysis was too low and the risk too high. But at this point, neither of them was in it for the money; they robbed, pillaged, and burned their way across Australia for the thrill of it. They’d acquired enough cash in their various illegal ventures that it was of secondary importance, an afterthought compared to the rush of adventure. 

Maybe it made them a couple of idiots, but at the very least, they were  _ a couple _ of idiots. 

“Christmas, though!” Junkrat marveled as they packed up the cash and stored it in the motorcycle’s sidecar. “Shoulda known it was getting to be that time of year, I’m sweatin’ bullets.” It was his first time celebrating the holiday with Roadhog. They’d been together for over a year, but he was  _ fairly _ certain that they had been doing a short stint in prison during the previous summer’s holidays. “Listen, mate, I know we can’t cart one around with us, but we gotta get our hands on a barbie for tomorrow. It ain’t Christmas without a proper barbecue!” He was getting increasingly excited at the thought of Christmas dinner, and he couldn’t help but salivate. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “And listen, I know ya don’t eat sausage, but I could  _ definitely _ do some kind of veggie thing for ya, there’s no kinda barbecue I can’t master, I am a fuckin’  _ genius _ \--”

“Junkrat,” Roadhog interrupted. “Shut up.” He climbed to his feet and opened the chopper’s rear storage compartment.

“What, m’I talkin’ too much again? Sorry, ‘Hog, ya know I can’t help it--”

“Here.” Roadhog pulled a parcel out of the boot and handed it to him. He sat back down.

Junkrat weighed the package in his hand. It was a strangely heavy cube, crudely wrapped in newspaper. He stared at Roadhog blankly. “Whazzat?” he asked. 

“A Christmas gift."  


Junkrat was having a difficult time comprehending this statement. Roadhog was giving him an actual present? He turned it over in his hands.

“I know it’s not Christmas, but my family always opened a present on Christmas Eve,” Roadhog was saying when Junkrat tore his attention back to him. 

On the one hand, Junkrat was delighted. Roadhog wanted to do family things with him! He was his  _ family!  _ On the other hand, he was still utterly confused. In his experience, Christmas was all about dinner, not gifts. “Okay, yeah, I see this, but why ya givin’ it to me? It don’t look like food.”

Roadhog looked at him for a long moment. “What do you think Christmas is?” he finally asked.

Junkrat folded his arms across his chest and huffed. He was beginning to think that he was missing a crucial piece of information about the holiday. “A day where ya celebrate with yer mates by cookin’ food together. It’s like. Food festival. And somethin’ religious, but no one gives a shit about that.”

“You are,” Roadhog said, pronouncing the words very slowly and deliberately, “so wrong.”

Junkrat could not believe what he was hearing. “I’m  _ wrong? _ What do ya mean I’m  _ wrong _ ?”

Roadhog pinched the brow of his mask. “Christmas isn’t about  _ food _ . That’s part of it, but it’s about giving presents to your family and friends. And decorating trees. And Santa Claus.” He appeared to be struggling to find the words to define the holiday. “How have you never celebrated Christmas?”

Junkrat raised his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, oh, okay, sorry we can’t all celebrate Christmas with yer fancy  _ presents _ and  _ trees _ ! That’s how we celebrated it in Junkertown, s’all I know about it. Piss off.” Sometimes he thought that Roadhog forgot that he didn’t have a life before the omnium explosion. He had been a Junker since he was six, and parentless since before that. He didn’t have a normal childhood with holiday traditions like Roadhog had. The two of them were disgustingly alike in many respects, but they had had vastly different life experiences and there was a great deal of discrepancies between their worldviews.  


Roadhog heaved a sigh. “Sorry. Open the present.”

Right. Presents. He might have been miffed over the argument about the meaning of Christmas, but he couldn’t deny that he was intensely curious by the surprise gift. Junkrat tore off the newspaper to reveal a square, metal box. A stylized pig face was painted on the lid, so similar to the ones stitched on the back pockets of Roadhog’s overalls, but with the features Junkrat always loved to incorporate into his art -- red x’d out eyes and wide, toothy smiles. 

Any irritation he had felt immediately dissipated, replaced by the deafening thought of  _ holy  _ shit _ , I love this man.  _ He was smitten with the way Roadhog had combined their individual interests into one visual representation. A dopey grin slid across his face. “Y’did this for me?”

“You didn’t open it yet.” 

Junkrat opened the lid, but he couldn’t see what was inside it, and shaking it upside down didn’t yield anything. Then he noticed the hand crank on the side of it. He wound it up, and a familiar melody started playing.

_ All around the Mulberry Bush,  _

_ The monkey chased the weasel.  _

_ The monkey stopped to pull up his sock. _

_ Pop! goes the weasel.  _

Junkrat waited with bated breath, but nothing sprang out at him. The next verse continued, and even without the benefit of the  _ pop! _ of a jack-in-the-box, he was content to sit there and hum along to the several verses. He always enjoyed a catchy tune.

_ Half a pound of tuppenny rice,  _

_ Half a pound of treacle.  _

_ Mix it up and make it nice-- _

Roadhog slammed the lid shut, and Junkrat jerked his head up to look at him. “...Pop! goes the weasel,” he mumbled, physically unable to leave the verse hanging.

“It would explode if you let it finish,” Roadhog explained.

Junkrat stared at him, the gears in his brain whirring as he processed this statement, then he burst into peals of shrill laughter. “It's a  _ bomb!” _ he exclaimed, turning it over in his hands and marveling at it. “Ya shouldn't have!” It was flashy and obnoxious, just his style, luring people in with an irritating earworm that begged to be quieted, only for the investigator to end up the victim of a nasty explosion. 

Roadhog gave a huff of laughter and shrugged. “It's your work at the heart of it.” It made sense, Junkrat was the engineer out of the two of them, of course Roadhog had been working with one of the timer bombs he had whipped up for fun. “I just rigged it together and took care of the presentation.”

“Well, ya did a helluva job with that.” Junkrat continued to stare at the gift with the utmost glee. “I love it,” he announced, clutching it to his chest. “I love  _ you _ , ya big lug!” He dropped the box so that he could fling his arms around Roadhog and plant a kiss on the snout of his mask. “Take off the mask so I can kiss you proper, ya drongo,” he demanded.

“No.” Roadhog  _ still _ refused to take off his gas mask, no matter how many times Junkrat bargained with him. It drove Junkrat crazy. He didn’t  _ need _ to see what was underneath to know that he loved his bodyguard, and he knew that he would continue to love him no matter what he looked like (god knew he wasn’t much of a looker himself), but  _ fuck _ if he didn’t want to.

Still, Roadhog was gracious. He relented slightly, pushing his mask up just far enough to give Junkrat access to his lips. When Junkrat tried to press his luck by reaching for the gas mask himself, Roadhog snatched his hands before they could do any damage. Junkrat gave a guilty little giggle. He settled for making out without being able to see Roadhog's features, like always.  _ Someday  _ he would convince the stubborn bastard to let him peek at what lay beneath.

That night, Junkrat insisted that Roadhog take the first sleep shift. “I'm  _ wired _ , mate, gotta burn off some of this energy before I hit the sack.”

Waiting until Roadhog fell asleep was excruciating. Sure, he'd had no way of knowing that giving gifts was a holiday tradition, but he still felt weirdly guilty that he couldn't reciprocate in the moment. And it was far too late to get or make anything now -- Christmas was in a matter of hours.

He might not have a tangible present to give Roadhog in return, but at least he could give him a memorable experience. Junkrat busied himself once he was certain Roadhog was sound asleep, pulling out flammable powders, chemicals, canisters, all his tools of the trade, and working by torchlight.

Once he was satisfied with his work, he painstakingly arranged everything, making sure it was perfectly positioned before he woke Roadhog.

“Oi, ‘Hog! Get up!” Startled awake, Roadhog automatically went for his gun, and Junkrat jumped back. “S’just me, big guy, don’t gotta blow me head off.” Roadhog holstered his scrap gun. “Sorry, I know y’ve got like another hour of sleep left in yer shift but -- heh -- couldn’t wait.” He never had been the patient type. “‘Sides, it’s best to do this when it’s still pitch black out, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” Roadhog's voice was still heavy with sleep.   


“Yer Christmas gift!” Junkrat grinned from ear to ear. “C’mere.” He led Roadhog away from the campsite, pointing to a spot on the ground with an imperious “stand here.” He had to take a moment to compose himself and rein in his enthusiasm before he lit up his masterpiece and scuttled back to join Roadhog.

Homemade fireworks went off one by one, bright explosions of color that lit up the night sky. The cracks and booms were exhilarating, giving Junkrat a heady rush of excitement, and he reached for Roadhog’s hand. Roadhog tore his gaze away from the show long enough to look down at Junkrat and squeeze his hand appreciatively.

When the last firecracker fizzled out, Junkrat raised his torch to shine a beam of light across the ground. The aftermath of the firework display left behind a large circle of soot and residue in the shape of a pig's face, so similar to the one Roadhog had drawn on his gift.

Junkrat flung his arms wide, as if to say  _ ta-da _ ! “Merry Christmas!” he shouted. “Next year, I'll make ya a real gift, since  _ apparently _ that's a thing, but I wanted to do  _ something  _ for ya today, since y’got me somethin.”

Roadhog laughed, unmasked delight in his deep, distorted  voice. “Thanks,” he said, pressing the snout of his mask to the top of Junkrat’s head. 

“Ya liked it?”

“I loved it.”

Junkrat grinned up at him. “Cheers, mate!” Roadhog placed a heavy hand of approval on his shoulder, and he glowed with pride.

“Now get some sleep.”

Junkrat hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until Roadhog said the words. He was the kind of tired that you could feel deep in your bones, burnt out from all the excitement of the past 24 hours. “Only if you join me.” It was a familiar arrangement between them. Junkrat and his treasure were too notorious amongst their fellow outlaws for either of them to be comfortable sleeping at the same time, but Junkrat had taken to dozing on top of his bodyguard while he kept watch.

Junkrat crawled on top of Roadhog and stretched along the length of his body. He rested his chin on his arms and looked up at Roadhog. “Hey, y’know what else ya can give me for Christmas?”

He could feel Roadhog’s voice rumbling in his chest, a deep vibration that he could feel in his bones. He shivered. “I already gave you your present. Don’t be greedy.”

“Oi! Yer one to talk about being greedy, ya pig!” Junkrat nudged Roadhog, who laughed. It was a big belly laugh, one that jostled Junkrat and caused him to dissolve into hysterics. It  _ was _ funny -- if the two thieves had to be personified as deadly sins, they would almost certainly be Greed and Gluttony. 

It took them a while to calm down. Every time Junkrat managed to get himself under control, he’d feel the rise and fall of Roadhog’s stomach, which set him off again, causing Roadhog to laugh harder. It was a vicious cycle.

“Okay, no, but seriously,” Junkrat finally said, wiping tears of mirth from the corners of his eyes. “Yer face. That’s what I want for Christmas.” He poked at the stitches in Roadhog’s mask, trying to worm his finger between the laces until Roadhog batted his hand away.

“I’m not taking my mask off,” he said with a note of finality. It was a tired argument between them.

“Oh come on!” Junkrat pleaded. “It’s Christmas!”

They were at a stalemate, neither one of them willing to back down. Junkrat drew his legs up so that he could sit on Roadhog's chest, arms folded as he stared him down. 

Finally, Roadhog heaved a sigh, the sound wheezing through the filters of his gas mask. He sat up straight, one enormous palm on Junkrat's back to keep him from tumbling to the ground. 

“What the--” Junkrat made an involuntary noise of alarm at the swift change in perspective and hastened to right himself. He settled into Roadhog's lap, legs straddling his hips and body pressed flush against his massive belly. He was about to ask what the big idea was, before he realized that Roadhog was finally indulging his insatiable curiosity. He promptly shut his mouth, not wanting to fuck up and ruin the moment, as he so often did.

Junkrat was practically vibrating with anticipation, watching Roadhog loosen the straps of his gas mask. He wanted to help, fingers itching to reach up and pluck the mask off himself, but for once, he managed to restrain his impulses.

He couldn't help but gasp when Roadhog pulled away his mask, simply because he’d been waiting for  _ so long _ , that anything that laid beneath would surprise him. Roadhog mistook it for disgust and quickly moved to put it back on. Junkrat promptly smacked it out of his hands. He'd seen the lower half of Roadhog's face plenty of times, memorized the fullness of his lips, the stubble at the end of the day, the scar that disappeared beneath the pushed up mask. He hadn’t been prepared to see the rest of the scar, a twisted gash that snaked up his cheek and curled around his left eye. He hadn’t anticipated the mass of scarred flesh that covered the upper right side of his face, the mottled, disfigured remnants of a nasty burn. And he definitely hadn’t been prepared to be spellbound by Roadhog’s light grey eyes, their piercing gaze wary and uncertain.

Junkrat thought he was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.

He gripped Roadhog’s face in his hands. “Oh, you son of a  _ bitch! _ Y’ve been deprivin’ me of this all this time?” He kissed Roadhog greedily, hungrily, hands roaming over the untraversed planes of his face. He was a tactile person, and he was giddy at the prospect of touching the perpetually covered parts of Roadhog's body. 

Roadhog laughed against his lips, only stopping Junkrat when he poked him the eye. Junkrat giggled breathlessly as Roadhog broke away from him. He didn't mind having his wrists trapped in Roadhog's hands. 

“Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal,” he said, grinning down at his bodyguard.

“I should be saying that to you.” Roadhog let go of Junkrat's hands and ran a finger down his chest, leaving a pale streak in the layer of soot that coated him.

Junkrat cackled gleefully and rubbed his filthy body all over Roadhog’s to even things out. “We should still steal a barbie,” he said once he’d worn himself out and was waiting for sleep to claim him. He rested his cheek on Roadhog’s chest. “You got yer holiday tradition, I should get mine.”

Roadhog hummed in agreement. 

Junkrat brightened and turned his head to look at Roadhog. “We can try out yer present to me! It’s a  _ perfect _ distraction!”

“Go to sleep, Junkrat.”

Junkrat finally settled down. There would be plenty of time when the sun rose for a proper Christmas celebration, barbecue and all. For now, he was happy to sleep, safe and warm with Roadhog as his pillow, the way it was meant to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!


End file.
